Richard Nieva is a staff writer for PandoDaily, covering startups and technology in Silicon Valley. He was previously a reporter for Fortune Magazine, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times and on CJR.org. You can follow him on Twitter.

FlightCar is a company of the moment. And by that, I mean it in the way that people say certain works of literature are “of their moment,” and that they couldn’t exist in any other time in history. If Airbnb was the seminal company that ushered the sharing economy into the mainstream, and Uber put it on wheels, and RelayRides, in its similar quest to make use of idle assets, combined the two – all in a clusterfuck of…

Hyperlocal news is a cruel sector that has already taken down a number of contenders, famously including ones with large corporate balance sheets. So when one company tries to do it on a thrift store budget, it’s audacious and hopeless, right? Patrick Kitano, who runs the Breaking News Network, doesn’t think so. Unlike a traditional news organization with a front page news site, BNN aggregates relevant local news from blogs and city officials and curates them through individual Twitter…

Last night, at the Churchill Club’s annual VC roundtable in Mountain View, CA, venture capitalists from firms like Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates told an audience how to best pitch them. Of course, none of these investors could agree. For instance, Peter Sonsini, a partner at NEA, told would-be entrepreneurs they should use VCs’ famous “herd mentality” to their advantage. Build up that allure, he said, make it seem like competing firms have been flirting with you in the…

This week, Zynga dove headfirst into turnaround mode. The company laid off 18 percent of its staff and shuttered offices in New York (where all of OMGPOP worked), Los Angeles, and Dallas. In a blog post announcing the job cuts, CEO Mark Pincus cited the need to focus more on mobile gaming as the reason for the bloodletting. But at the company’s annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday, one shareholder in attendance said the meeting was lopsidedly focused on real…

In an age of “smart” everything – phone, TV, scale, watch, fridge – here’s an idea that’s refreshingly contrarian: build an app that’s not so smart. Not dumb. Just one that doesn’t try to be smart enough to do everything for a user. That’s the idea behind Cal, a new calendar app announced today by the startup Any.do. The big draw of the app is a nice-looking, fluid interface, which automatically changes according to where you are in your…

Zynga held its annual shareholder meeting today at a hotel in downtown San Francisco. The gathering comes one day after the social gaming company laid off 520 employees — about 18 percent of its workforce — to focus on mobile gaming, according to a blog post by CEO Mark Pincus. The company also shuttered offices in New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas. I tried to attend the meeting, though reps from Zynga would not allow me into the room.…

Here is your meta moment for the day: Predictive apps, like Google Now, Grokr and Tempo, are all the rage. But what if there were a predictive service to help you discover those predictive apps? Xyo, an app discovery search engine, today launched a product called Apps for Me that works along those lines. Instead of processing a query typed into a search field, Xyo pulls information from everything you’ve “liked” on Facebook and feeds you app recommendations based…

You’ve heard us say it before: Online video is a pain in the ass. Bryan Goldberg lays out the argument for professionally produced content, but really, the same argument can be applied to providing compelling user-generated content. For example, not many people will cut it as on-screen or voiceover talent, and people at work and school can’t easily watch video without getting caught. Here’s one unlikely group that’s getting in on the effort to make user-generated online video better:…

StartX, an incubator spun out of Stanford in 2010, held its ninth Demo Day last night in Palo Alto. The accelerator is for students who have attended the university, and is a bit different from most, being a nonprofit that takes no equity from member companies. In the past, it has graduated startups like the social network Knotch, and Loki Studios, which was recently bought by Yahoo in Marissa Mayer’s acquisition spree. But yesterday’s Demo Day…